Research Engineer Graduate (Agentic Arch) — 2027 Start (PhD)

Responsibilities The TikTok Agentic Arch team is building AI-native engineering infrastructure that transforms how software is designed, built, and operated at TikTok scale. We research and deploy reliable long-horizon agents that can reason over large codebases, interact with complex tools and environments, and complete consequential engineering work across distributed production systems. Our environment provides a unique opportunity to advance agent research through real-world execution feedback. You will develop frontier methods, evaluate them rigorously, and bring them into production through platforms used at large scale—creating measurable improvements in engineering productivity, software quality, and operational effectiveness. We are looking for talented individuals to join our team. As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth. Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by the end of the year. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume. Responsibilities

• Conduct frontier research on reliable long-horizon agents for complex, multi-step software engineering and operations tasks.
• Advance agent capabilities in areas such as hierarchical planning and reasoning, memory and context management, tool use, environment interaction, and multi-agent coordination.
• Co-design agents and models through post-training, reinforcement learning, learning from execution feedback, search, and test-time scaling to improve performance on real-world tasks.
• Build scalable agent infrastructure for orchestration, evaluation, observability, and reliable execution across large codebases, engineering toolchains, and distributed production environments.
• Apply and validate new methods in representative workflows such as cross-repository software changes, testing and verification, large-scale migrations, deployment, and incident diagnosis and remediation.
• Translate research into production systems, define rigorous evaluation methodologies, and measure impact through task success, software quality, engineering efficiency, and system performance.
• Collaborate with researchers, infrastructure teams, developer-platform teams, and product engineers to deploy solutions at scale and produce publishable research and broader scientific insights where appropriate.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a PhD degree in Computer Science or a related discipline.
• Demonstrated research or engineering experience in AI agents or closely related areas such as large language model reasoning, reinforcement learning, program synthesis, or AI for code.
• Strong understanding of one or more relevant areas, including agent planning and reasoning, model post-training, reinforcement learning, memory and context systems, tool learning, multi-agent systems, or agent evaluation.
• Strong programming and systems-building ability in at least one language such as Python, C++, Go, or Java, with the ability to turn research ideas into robust implementations.
• Ability to formulate ambiguous real-world problems, design rigorous experiments and evaluations, analyze results, and iterate from evidence.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work across research, infrastructure, platform, and product teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Evidence of research excellence through influential publications, open-source work, deployed systems, or other significant contributions. Relevant venues include NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, MLSys, OSDI, SOSP, NSDI, ICSE, and FSE.
• Experience building or deploying LLM agents, AI developer tools, or agent platforms in complex or large-scale environments.
• Hands-on experience with model post-training, reinforcement learning, execution-feedback loops, tool-using agents, distributed agent runtimes, or scalable evaluation systems.
• Experience working with large codebases, distributed systems, CI/CD and testing infrastructure, developer platforms, or production operations
• A track record of translating research into measurable production impact.

Job Information

【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually)

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $153900 - $300960 annually. Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units. Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure). The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice. For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates: Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment: 1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues; 2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and 3. Exercising sound judgment.

About TikTok

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we also have offices in New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

Why Join Us

Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy - a mission we work towards every day. We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us. Diversity & Inclusion TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.

TikTok Accommodation

TikTok is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at